Something like 40% of Labour voters went Leave. There are real, substantive criticisms of the EU to be made from the Left, and Varoufakis was the only Remainer publicly grappling with them; everyone else was like "what could you possibly dislike about the EU other than migrants?" while conveniently forgetting Greece*.

I am not in any way defending Brexit. It was the wrong decision, and being deeply critical of the EU (much like #bernieorbust) is not a reason to empower dipshits like Johnson and Farage and embolden right-wing secessionist movements like those of Italy's Beppe Grillo, who is basically what you would get if Stephen Colbert entered a fugue state, became the character, and got a gig with Infowars. However, the vote to leave was very narrow and if the EU were not neoliberalism at its absolute worst Farage would have been ridden out on a rail.

I guess what I'm saying is people who are like PRESIDENT TRUMP?!?! should get a grip

*which, coincidentally, is why Varoufakis is pretty much the last person on Earth who can credibly claim you can reform the EU from within

Yeah, there are actually good reasons to dislike the EU and the EU itself is REALLY not making a compelling case for membership these days.

The thing is, this is a huge, long term project. The reasonable and hopeful view is to understand that there will be shot-term troughs and problems but that these will be gradually worked out over a longer term. Leaving is ultimately very short-sighted.

And something like 100% of UKIP. Not all pro-Leave voters were white nationalist xenophobes, but all white nationalist xenophobes voters were pro-Leave.

pacobird wrote:There are real, substantive criticisms of the EU to be made from the Left, and Varoufakis was the only Remainer publicly grappling with them; everyone else was like "what could you possibly dislike about the EU other than migrants?" while conveniently forgetting Greece*.

That's a fair point in broad strokes. I don't think it's entirely true; I heard rather a lot of "Yes, there are problems, but we're better off trying to reform them than leaving." But people like a convenient narrative, and it's perfectly accurate to say this was organized by a bunch of racists -- but that's not likely to win over anybody who's for it and isn't a racist.

If the goal is to win over people who aren't racists, yeah, calling them racists is not a very good strategy for doing that. But at the same time, I feel that it's negligent not to point out racism where you see it. When you point out that politicians are using Nazi visuals and slogans, that's not so much Godwin's Law as The Emperor's New Clothes.

pacobird wrote:I guess what I'm saying is people who are like PRESIDENT TRUMP?!?! should get a grip

I think the parallels are really quite clear, and "a lot of middle-class voters who aren't racist but have serious issues with what globalization has done to their economic status voted for it" could apply just as easily to Trump.

Or he could end up losing by twenty points. Obviously I'd prefer for that to happen. But I'd be less surprised by a four-point Trump victory than I would by a twenty-point Trump defeat.

I'd put the likeliest outcome as Clinton winning by somewhere between five and eight points of the popular vote. But I do think Trump's popularity is one datapoint in a disquieting multinational trend, that he does have a shot and winning, at that there's a possibility if he won it wouldn't even be the most alarming nationalist victory this year.

I'm still tickled retarded that this number wasn't actually 100%. A straight up single issue party and almost one out of ten of them were trolling, changed their minds, or seriously just forgot what side of a binary decision they were supposed to be on.

Actually, Texas is the second largest state by GDP per capita, right between California and New York. It's comparable to Spain by that metric, but Spain's only like the sixth largest economy in the EU. The UK is the third largest. It's actually pretty close. If anything Texas is a bigger deal for the US than the UK is for the EU, but just barely.